5 Movies That Perfectly Capture Exactly How It Feels to Be 25

I finally turned 25 (this past Thursday) and have realized it is the momentous age since turning 21. I am able to rent a car cheaply, have been alive for a quarter of a century and am no longer considered in my “early 20s.” There are many ways to illustrate what it feels like being 25, but movies do the best of it. These are five movies that encompass how I feel at 25.

1. The Hangover

Everybody knows the movie. Four men go to Las Vegas for a bachelor party, they lose one of their friends, and do not remember what happened the previous night. The three friends recount their night, discovering a night of debauchery, shenanigans and insanity. While typically these type of events are normally for your early twenties, I have spoken to many friends who still have nights like these. Nights where you go out, have a ton of fun, hang out with your best friends and don’t remember what happened the previous night. The next morning, you wake up, head pounding and you don’t remember the night before. Your friends have to fill you in on what happened. While I don’t say you should go out and black out, there are times when you wake up with a really nasty hangover, my 25th birthday being that.

2. 500 Days of Summer

In the movie, Tom Hansen (Jason Gordon-Levitt) falls in love with Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel). They meet in an unconventional way, starting up as a casual fling, progressing into something more romantic. They fall in love and sadly, fall out of love. This movie captures love at 25 perfectly. Sometimes you meet somebody who you never thought you would date, fall in love with them and then life takes you in different directions and you fall out of love. Tom encompasses what it feels like to break up and try to move on. At 25, you have relationships that come in and out of your life for reasons and the most important thing is that you learn from those relationships.

3. Waiting

This movie, starring Justin Long, is about a waiter who works at a restaurant called Shenaniganz wanting to move on with his life. He realizes he is stuck at a dead end job and wants a more promising future. Most of us at 25, in this economy, are waiting for something better, whether it be a better job, for marriage, for having kids or for something. We have gone to college and are stuck at a dead end job. While I may have a good job at the moment, I am still waiting for that break, for a better “bigger” girl job as I label it.

4. Bridesmaids

This one hits home especially since most of my friends are getting married. Bridesmaids follows the story of one woman, Annie (Kristen Wiig) who becomes a bridesmaid for her best friend. After her failed business venture and bad relationships, her friend and her have a falling out. Eventually Annie hits rock bottom and moves back into her mothers and receives a literal bitch slap in the face from Melissa McCarthy. This movie encompasses many millennials who have gone out, tried to get a great job and have had to come back home to live with their parents. How many of us have felt like we failed at 25? But, on the flip side, we receive that reality check and are able to pick up our feet, little by little and realize that we have more in us.

5. Wall-E

Now some of you may wonder why I chose this movie. Wall-E is about a robot who lives on an uninhabitable Earth gathering garbage until another robot, Eve, finds life. Later on, Eve takes the plant back to the ship and shows it to human captain. The humans have devolved to the point where they cannot walk and are so caught up in technology they have no recollection of how their former human ancestors lived. Eventually, they return back to Earth and start anew. This movie is very telling of how I feel about my friends at 25. The humans on the ship are so involved in the media that they forget what it’s like to have a real conversation. Being 25, I feel that some of my friends do not know how to have a real conversation without whipping out their cell phones. Technology, at times, has hindered our ability to have interpersonal relationships.

At 25, I have lived through a lot of tragedies and triumphs. The most important thing that I have learned is to look past those tragedies and try and remember that there is good in the world.